A new way of creating value for the customer via loyalty rather than premium price is beginning to emerge throughout the country, however. The concept was introduced in 2008 by InterAction Metrics, an Oregon-based company specializing in customer-experience optimization and customer-interaction management. Much of the following advice comes from the white paper published by that company.

We at Kendall College have embraced the main tenets of the new interaction economy by putting them into practice in the School of Culinary Arts. Our goal is to arm students with the experience and know-how to deliver unparalleled customer service so that they may reach the pinnacles of success in their foodservice careers.

As illustrated by InterAction Metrics, interaction and experience strategies offer two different models for creating value and collaborating with customers.

In value creation, whereas an experience strategy uses excellent experiences to justify premium pricing, an interaction strategy seeks to engender high rates of loyalty, because growing the customer segment of multi-time buyers is almost always more profitable than selling at top price. It is difficult to imagine a company successfully charging six times the standard for its services or products. On the other hand, it is possible to imagine an enthusiastic customer returning to buy six, seven, eight or more times. With an interaction strategy, the objective is not to get customers to pay more for the experience, but to create value such that customers become loyal to the experience.

Using an interaction strategy, collaboration with customers is not limited to listening to them at a few points in the customer life-cycle, as occurs with an experience strategy. Instead, collaboration is planned, controlled and integrated into every touch point with the customer.

Employing an Interaction Strategy
A successful interaction strategy that results in increased sales in your retail foodservice outlets (serving the public, students/staff/administration or everyone) involves three steps. While each step is valuable in itself, if you forfeit any one of these areas, you will fail to reap the rewards of a true interaction strategy. Those steps are:

1. Engage active customer listening.
2. Prepare a staff plan at each customer touch point.
3. Test and measure.

Your customers respond on conscious and unconscious levels to every aspect of their interactions with your student employees. And in most cases, these interactions have a greater cumulative impact on them than any page on your website or slick promotion you might create.

Let’s say, for example, that you have someone staked at the entrance of your student dining hall to simply ask how a customer is doing today, which probably elicits an “I’m good, thanks” response. Most likely, “How are you today?” has no special relevance to your brand. Instead, a more appropriate greeting that actually addresses the staff objective of helping customers find what they need would be, “Thanks for coming in; can I point you in a direction?” Of course, there are many variations on this statement, but the point is to use the moment to further the brand and sales objectives of your operation.

Bottom line: Don’t limit your involvement with student employees to policies and procedures. Get clear about your customer objectives relative to every possible positive and negative point of contact (because yes, unfortunately, sometimes things just don’t go right). Then brainstorm (and when applicable role-play) with your students for ways they can express your business objectives using improvisation and their personal style.

Most Importantly in an interactive strategy, test and measure. Just because most companies talk up their excellent customer service does not mean that they have perfected the customer interaction. Objective measurement and feedback addresses this variability at a local level.

With a measurement process in place, immediate action can be taken to remedy performance gaps. Then, once you’re confident that the designed experience is working, evaluate personally if anything about the experience is generic, artificial or annoying for customers. Be critical and make sure you are evaluating a situation in which student workers don’t know they’re being observed. Then wait a week or two and test again.

In the next edition of “The Gold Medal Classroom,” I’ll wrap up my focus on the new interaction economy by discussing power-emotion tactics that, when effectively employed by your students, instructors and staff, are fool-proof to increase customer loyalty to your retail foodservice outlets—and thus increase sales.

Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA, is the dean of the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago.